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I Hope This Helps
Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir’s poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields.
I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I'm thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.
I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I'm thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.
- GenresPoetry
144 pages, Paperback
Published May 13, 2025
3 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
Samiya Bashir
13 books86 followersReach out to connect!
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu (Patua Films) and dancer Keyon Gaskin (Physical Education) to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound + image + light.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu (Patua Films) and dancer Keyon Gaskin (Physical Education) to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound + image + light.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
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June 12, 2025
An intense, deeply beautiful work!?
March 17, 2026
This collection, with its variety of mediums within the book (poetry, block print, sheet music overlaid on poems, photography) felt so alive. It was dynamic and exciting to read, and then the heart of the writing was real and tender as well. "Letter from Exile" reminded me that the pandemic was real, threw me back into the achey mental throws of 2020. It was so well written, poetic and transparent, too.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews